Chicago`s Vanishing Machine

It says something about the sorry state of the Chicago Democratic Party that it could be forced to pick as its standard-bearer in the 1987 mayoral contest someone it does not like.

The prospect that Jane Byrne--a former mayor dismissed as a political force two years ago--could box the party into a corner is yet another sign of how far the once-mighty Cook County Democratic machine has fallen.

The party`s slide has been like a slow-moving avalanche. The death of its patriarch, Richard J. Daley, the court rulings sharply restricting patronage and the election of a black reformer as mayor have all combined to put the party in its present advanced state of decay.

Only a handful of Democratic committeemen still run effective ward organizations and many even question the value of the party`s endorsement in 1987--for Byrne or anyone else. Some suggest that the party forgo slating to avoid the embarrassment of supporting a losing candidate for the third mayoral election in a row.

``I don`t think the endorsement is worth too much,`` said Ald. Edward Burke, 14th Ward committeeman and a machine mainstay. ``Independent committeemen can vote for an endorsement and then go the other way. It`s more symbolic than anything else. There are only about 11 or 12 wards with real organizations, that canvass and ring doorbells and produce a vote.``

``We have to get out of the mind-set of the 1960s that the endorsement of the Democratic Party is the pre-eminent thing,`` said State Rep. Al Ronan (D., Chicago), another organization stalwart.

Such talk from regulars would have been considered heresy at one time. Now it`s routine.

It is true that if the party picks its shots carefully, it can still exert influence. It was a major factor in Walter Mondale`s defeat of Gary Hart in the 1984 Illinois primary. And it helped Paul Simon defeat Sen. Charles Percy last November, persuading thousands of errant Democrats to return to the Democratic column after casting their ballots for Republican Ronald Reagan.

But compared with the litany of embarrassing defeats over the last decade, these cases stand out as exceptions that prove the rule. A local party`s primary function is to elect local candidates, and here the recent record is dismal, with the most glaring example being the loss of the crown jewel of local politics, the mayor`s office, in 1983.

In many ways, the Democratic Party is coming more and more to resemble the party as it existed in the early part of this century, when it was little more than a collection of rival ethnic dutchies ridden with jealousies and prejudices.

Anton Cermak, the West Side Bohemian elected mayor in 1931, forged the groups into an effective political organization to remove the hated Big Bill Thompson from City Hall. His successor, Ed Kelly, consolidated his success, turning the party into the celebrated well-oiled machine Daley made famous.

Now, a half-century of dominance is over and the party appears to be regressing to its former self.

In a sense, Chicago is just catching up with the rest of the country. As with many of the fabled Democratic machines across the country--Bill Green`s in Philadelphia, Frank Hague`s in Jersey City, James Michael Curley`s in Boston and Tammany Hall in New York--television, changing population trends and shrinking government are helping to relegate Chicago`s machine to the history books.

Now TV, not local precinct captains, inform and persuade voters. The sons and daughters of the great turn-of-the-century immigrant migration have moved to the suburbs, leaving the cities more poor, more black and more Hispanic. And anti-government sentiment, on top of the Shakman ruling ending most patronage, makes it difficult if not impossible for politicians to maintain the patronage armies needed to keep a political organization alive.

Can the old days ever return? Not likely, certainly not while Mayor Harold Washington and his rival, Ald. Edward Vrdolyak (10th), are on the scene.

``In order to make the party what it once was, you have to have a leader who can appeal to blacks and whites,`` said a Democratic committeeman. ``And I don`t think Vrdolyak will ever be able to appeal to blacks. Harold has the potential, but whether he`ll ever train his attentions on that, I don`t know.``

The future of the Democratic organization will depend to a great extent on how the city emerges from the Washington era. If the mayor is defeated for re-election, there will be much anger and apathy among blacks toward the Democratic Party and the political system in general. It could be many years before they are re-integrated into the process, during which time the party would not be able to count on their votes as it did during the Daley era and before.

If the mayor leaves the scene in a more peaceful fashion, however, it could pave the way for the emergence of new political leaders, black and white, who would be less polarizing than Washington and Vrdolyak and more willing to seek support across racial lines.

Wilson Goode in Philadelphia, a black mayor whose appeal reaches both whites and blacks, provides a model that many politicians here envy.

The Democratic Party is not going to disintegrate, but the machine is fast disappearing. What political structures replace it will be determined, in large part, by the battles now being waged.